Sheila K. Dickison, PhD

Sheila Dickison has headed the Honors Program at the University of Florida since 1996 and held the position of Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences between 1989 and 1995. Dickison received a BA in French and Latin from the University of Toronto and an MA and PhD in Latin and Greek from Bryn Mawr College. She is a past president of the American Classical League. A winner of the Florida Blue Key Distinguished Faculty Award in 1997 and the Association of Academic Women's Achievement Award in 1999, Dickison is the author of more than 20 publications and is coauthor with Judith P. Hallett of A Roman Women Reader: Selections from the 2nd Century BCE-2nd Century CE (Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, forthcoming), coauthor with Patsy Rodden Ricks of Cicero: De Amicitia Selections (Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 2006), and coeditor with Judith P. Hallett of Rome and Her Monuments: Essays on the City and Literature of Rome in Honor of Katherine A Geffcken (Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 2000).

This selection of Latin readings, drawn from texts in a variety of genres across four centuries, aims to provide a comprehensive and accurate picture of the images and realities of women in Roman antiquity. Depicted in the readings are both historical and fictional women, of varying ages and at different stages of life, from a range of social classes, and from different locales. We see them dramatized—sometimes in their own words—in the roles the women actually played, as wives and mothers, friends and lovers. This Reader differs from others in showing women in explicitly erotic roles, in drawing some of its passages from "archaic" Latin, and in encouraging a variety of critical approaches, all suitable for its intended college-level audience.